Here on Earth (7 page)

“That’s nothing,” Susie says, brushing at the dog hair stuck to the one dress she owns that’s sober enough to wear to a funeral. Susie has cropped blond hair and gray-blue eyes and black is definitely not her color, dog hair or no. “You want real news? Mr. and Mrs. Morrisey are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Jane—remember that bitch?—to some guy they don’t think much of who’s got a job with the DPW in Gloucester and is really cute. I saw him at the engagement party and double wow. He probably will be a problem. Halfway through the party, he asked me for my phone number. Everyone has to invite me to everything, you know, if they want a mention in The
Bugle.”

“That’s because you’re a superior being,” March says.

“As are you,” Susie says. “Hence our friendship.”

Gwen, who’s been listening in and who now struggles to climb into the cab of the pickup in her extremely short skirt, cannot believe how ridiculous her mother and Susanna Justice are when they get together. Susie comes out to California once or twice a year, and they’re just as stupid on the West Coast as they are right here. “You are both so mature,” she says disdainfully.

Gwen’s tiny black dress isn’t the only reason Susanna Justice and March shut up and stare. Gwen is wearing gloopy black mascara and has moussed her hair so that it spikes up in the front, like a little bed of nails. Wait till she tells her friend Minnie:
There I was, trapped like a rat, with the two of them giving me fashion attitude. I couldn’t get away, I was trapped, I tell you, trapped in a way no human being should ever be.

“You’re letting her go like that?” Susie asks March.

“Letting her?” People who haven’t had children have the oddest ideas.

“Can we just go to the funeral and get this over with?” Gwen says in her froggy voice. Before coming outside, she sneaked a cigarette in the bathroom, then doused herself with some Jean Naté she found in the medicine cabinet which she thinks has gotten rid of the scent of smoke.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Susie says, getting in behind the wheel. “Let’s not let Judith’s funeral take up too much of your precious time.”

“Exactly,” Gwen says. She’s flipped down the visor in order to get a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She wishes for two things: bigger eyes and a thinner face. She can’t abide her own reflection, so how could anyone else? Maybe her mother and that stupid Susie aren’t so wrong when they judge her. Cutting her hair was certainly a mistake, she sees that now. Her look is so wrong it’s almost a joke. She’d like to be the human equivalent of an Afghan hound. Instead, what she sees is a beagle looking back at her.

“Do you mind?” March says.

Scrunched in next to Gwen, March has to struggle to push the visor back up so it won’t jab either of them in the eye as they ride along the bumpy back road. This day is going to be awful. It’s the sort of day you wouldn’t mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.

“I can’t believe Judith is really dead,” March says. “She took care of everyone and never complained. I can’t think of a single selfish thing she ever did. Not ever. She was the greatest.”

“She was something, all right,” Susie concurs.

March might have called Susie on a statement like that, but the road has become so bumpy Susie is concentrating on navigating past the ruts. And anyway, Susie always took pride in being cryptic.
What is that supposed to mean?
March was always saying when they were younger and thrown together for the day, and Susie would always look at her as if March were crazy and any implications sprang from March’s own unreliable imagination.

“This is where my rental car died,” March says as they approach the deepest of the ruts.

“Then hold on,” Susie says, and for old time’s sake she floors the gas pedal for a real roller-coaster ride.

“You guys are nuts,” Gwen shouts, but Susie and March, supposedly older and wiser, pay no attention to her. For a little while at least, as they shake and rattle over the bumps, they manage to forget today’s destination. They forget how long it’s been since they’ve walked down this road, arm in arm. They were fierce and fearless girls back then, in their jeans and boots and sweaters, and March, for one, was absolutely confident of what her future would bring: total happiness and true love, that’s what she wanted. Nothing more or less would do, just as no other place would ever be home: nowhere but the hill would ever be as comfortable or as beautiful or as real.

Susanna Justice suddenly steps on the brakes, hard, so they’re all snapped back by the force of their seat belts.

“Do you believe that goddamn thing?” Susie says, as a rabbit runs right in front of them.

This landscape is definitely real, if nothing more. From the minute March woke this morning, in the old bed where she’d slept for thousands of nights, she knew coming back had been a mistake. She opened her eyes, and already she was thinking of Hollis. When she saw the lattice of frost on the inside of her windowpanes it was exactly as if she never had left. Her room was always the chilliest in the house. Often, she would find that the tumbler of water she’d left beside her bed had frozen solid. She remembers how she would hold the glass up and breathe on the ice until it melted into streams that spelled out Hollis’s name.

The first thing she did today, after she pulled on her navy-blue dress and a black sweater, was go downstairs in her bare feet and try to phone Richard. From where she stood, by the telephone table, she could see Gwen, asleep on the couch in the little sewing room. She could see through the oval window, past the garden and the trees. Her heart was racing, that was the silly thing. She had begun to make a bargain with herself, the kind that women who are in love with the wrong man always resort to: If Richard answered by the fifth ring, she would be all right. She would be perfectly safe, and safety, after all, was what she had opted for, even though she was back here looking out at the apple trees she used to climb. And then she’d realized how early it was in California, only a little past three a.m., and she’d hung up quickly, but she’d been all right without talking to him; she’d made tea in one of Judith’s pretty ceramic pots and in no time she was fine.

Or so she had thought. Now that she’s face-to-face with the pastures of Guardian Farm her skin feels cold. She wishes she had brought along gloves and a heavy woolen scarf. At this moment, she’d prefer to be a million miles away.

“Don’t worry,” Susie says. She’s noticed the distress on her friend’s face. “He won’t show up at the funeral. Take my word for it. He’s still refusing to do whatever it is he should.”

March gives Susie a look which she hopes will silence her, but it’s too late.

“Who are we talking about?” Gwen asks.

Gwen always does that—listens when you don’t want her to, ignores you whenever there’s something you want her to hear.

“No one,” March tells her.

“A figment of our imagination,” Susie insists on adding. “Or some of us, anyway.”

“Yeah, right,” Gwen says tartly. “Like I know what you mean.”

“She means she’s a know-it-all,” March says, but inside she’s thinking,
Lucky for me that you don’t understand. Lucky for you.

They’ve left plenty of time to get to the service, and yet somehow they’ve managed to be late. The parking lot is already crowded when they pull in, and why shouldn’t it be? Judith Dale had a lot of friends, from the library, where she’d been a member of the board for ages, and from the garden club, which did so much to beautify the town, and from St. Bridget’s as well, where she volunteered in the children’s ward two nights a week, reading stories and playing games of Candyland.

March remembers wondering why it was that Mrs. Dale didn’t have children of her own. She’d asked her once, when it was late at night and she’d been sick with a fever and Mrs. Dale had been sitting up with her, spoon-feeding her rice pudding and endless cups of tea.

“That’s not what was intended for me,” Mrs. Dale had told her.

What Mrs. Dale had meant by that, March never quite understood. Was it God she was referring to, or the hand of fate, or the choices she herself had made, perhaps a long time ago? At any rate, there were sides of Mrs. Dale which were secret, and sides which were not. She liked rain, and children, and going off by herself on holidays from which she brought back small tokens as gifts: pretty matches, hair combs, mints with pink and green candy shells. She believed in home cooking and in the supreme beauty of yellow roses, six dozen of which March has ordered for this service. The scent of roses is sweet and ripe and sorrowful, making March dizzy as she goes to sit in the front row of the chapel, between Gwen and her father’s old law partner, Susie’s father, the Judge.

The Judge is tall, six foot four, and so imposing that some people say there are criminals who confess at the mere sight of him. But today, he seems a shakier version of himself; he will be seventy-two next month and his age shows, in his large hands, which tremble, in his pallor and his faded blue eyes. He keeps one hand on March’s, but for whose comfort, even the Judge isn’t certain.

Since there’s not room in the pew for everyone, Louise Justice, the Judge’s wife, is sitting directly behind them. Every once in a while she leans forward and pats March or the Judge on the shoulder.

“This is such a shock,” she whispers, again and again.

Judith Dale left instructions for the service to be simple, just as the marker she chose for herself is to be a plain gray stone. Gwen had no idea how depressing such a service could be. She is sitting up straight, studying the closed coffin. She actually seems frozen in place, her skin white as ice. With her spiky hair and her excess of mascara, she looks fairly ghoulish. Several people who have come up to give March their condolences have avoided Gwen completely, or have shaken her cold hand without saying a word.

Now, while Harriet Laughton is giving the final address, on behalf of Judith Dale’s friends on the board of the library, Gwen leans close to her mother. For one brief moment, March thinks her daughter wants a hug.

“I’m going to be sick,” Gwen whispers.

“No,” March says, even though the scent of roses and the heat inside the chapel are cloying. “You won’t be.”

“I’m not kidding,” Gwen insists. It’s the smell of death that’s getting to her. It’s the very idea. “Oh, boy,” she says, sounding scared.

March and Gwen make their way out of the pew; then March circles an arm around her daughter and guides her into the aisle, toward the door. She can hear a murmur of concern: the voices of Judith Dale’s friends, kindhearted volunteers from the library and the hospital.

“You just need fresh air,” March tells Gwen.

Gwen nods and gulps, but she feels like she may not make it. She manages a dash for the door, and when she races past Hank—who is in the last row, along with Ken Helm, who considered Mrs. Dale one of his favorite customers, and Mimi Frank, who cut Mrs. Dale’s hair—he looks up in time to see Gwen slipping out of the chapel, quick as a shadow. It’s not often you see someone you don’t know in the village, and Hank has the sudden urge to get out of his pew and follow this girl. She looks so distressed, and she’s beautiful besides, but Hank isn’t the sort to storm out of a funeral service. He stays where he is, seated beside one of the vases of yellow roses March ordered from the Lucky Day Florist on Main Street. He’s wearing his one good white shirt, a pair of black jeans he hopes don’t look too beat-up, and his boots, which he polished last night. He borrowed a tie from Hollis, who has a closetful of expensive clothes; he combed his hair twice.

All the same, Hank has a shivery feeling under his skin, in spite of how overheated the chapel has become, and when the service is over, he’s one of the first to leave. This way, so quick to be out the door, he’s more likely to get another look at the girl. And he does—she’s over on the curb, so dizzy that she needs to keep one hand on the fender of the hearse, for balance. Three crows are flying above the parking lot, making a horrible racket. The sky is so flat and gray Gwen has the urge to put her arms over her head for protection, just in case stones should begin to fall from the clouds.

Six strong men—Ken Helm, the Judge, Dr. Henderson, Mr. Laughton, Sam Deveroux from the hardware store, and Jack Harvey, who installed an air conditioner for Mrs. Dale last summer—help to carry the coffin from the chapel. Just seeing them struggle with its weight brings tears to Gwen’s eyes. Here she is, with her short skirt and her hair all spiked up, looking like a perfect fool, completely unprepared for real life. Well, ready or not doesn’t matter. Something is about to happen. Gwen can feel it. Time itself has changed; it’s become electrified, with every second standing on end.

Gwen can see her mother now, in the doorway of the chapel, a look of heartbreak on her face. Here comes the coffin, carried even closer. This is not the sort of thing that usually affects Gwen; she has a talent for blocking out bad news. All she has to do is shut her eyes and count to a hundred, but she’s not closing her eyes now. Oh, how she wishes she had stayed at home. How easy it would have been to go on thinking about nothing, to ignore death and fate and the possibility that a life can easily be shaken to its core. That is how you know you’ve left childhood behind—when you wish for time to go backward. But it’s too late for that. Whether Gwen likes it or not, she’s here, under this gray and mournful sky, and her eyes are open wide.

A
fter the cemetery, and the buffet supper at Harriet Laughton’s house—where March is called
poor dear
at least a dozen times, and Gwen is asked so often whether something is wrong with her eyes that she finally goes into the Laughtons’ powder room to remove her mascara with a white washcloth—March phones Ken Helm, who always says no job is so odd he can’t get it done, and asks if he’ll drive them back to the hill.